photo © Whitney Brown
“Women must be equal under the law!”
—MARCY SYMS, entrepreneur, author, and president of the Sy Syms Foundation
I first met Marcy Syms at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 2016. I had just taken over the role of executive director at Women’s eNews and had been invited to the Feminist Majority Foundation’s luncheon, where Marcy was speaking. I was looking forward to meeting her, not only because she’d been a long-time supporter of Women’s eNews, but also because I’d been told by many members of our staff that she was one of the nicest people I’d ever meet. They were right.
As Marcy spoke on stage, she appeared warm and engaging, her wide, bright smile never faltering. She greeted me with the same wide smile when I introduced myself after her speech. It was clear that she had that rare quality of being able to make new acquaintances feel like old friends. She even smiled when she spoke about the frustrations she experienced in her crusade to get the Equal Rights Amendment added to the US Constitution, an issue that was and continues to be close to her heart.
I interviewed her for this book in December 2019, just one day after an event Women’s eNews hosted on the subject of workplace equality. I recalled her seeming optimism, how she smiled even in the face of hardship, and she told me, “I love people, I always have.” This seems to continually provide her with an upbeat nature which, in turn, naturally draws people to her.
The event Women’s eNews hosted the day before included three panel discussions: equal pay, hiring and retaining female employees, and unconscious bias. Funding for the event had been made possible by the Sy Syms Foundation’s Excellence in Journalism Program, an annual program created by Marcy Syms that provides funding to Women’s eNews to train aspiring female journalists in the pursuit of journalistic excellence and investigative reporting for five straight years.
“For a democracy to flourish, all voices must be heard,” Marcy said upon launching this program in 2014. As of the writing of this book, Women’s eNews has gone on to train one dozen reporters in the researching, interviewing, writing, and editing of articles on the subject of gender equality and social justice through a local, national, and international lens.
Marcy and I met for the interview in my Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. When, early in our conversation, we spoke about the importance of women having their own money, I told her I first learned this important lesson as a high school sophomore when I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
“I love Virginia Woolf,” she replied. “I wrote my college thesis on her.”
I stood up in search of two old books I own—a 1932 edition of A Room of One’s Own and a 1928 edition of Woolf’s Orlando, two of my most prized literary possessions. As she leafed through them, I rummaged through a number of other shelves searching for my 1938 edition of Harper’s Bazaar, which published a short story written by Virginia Woolf called “The Duchess and the Jeweler.”
We looked through the magazine together, marveling at the advertisements, mostly fashion ads targeting wealthy women, which represented most of the magazine’s subscribers at the time. There were many ads from Bonwit Teller, the Manhattan-based, women’s high-end clothing store that famously stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street from 1930 to 1980. The entire magazine and its ads were in black and white. One ad displayed two elegant, thin white women wearing items from its spring collection, standing poised beneath the phrase: “We present the spring fashions destined for importance.” Another showed three women, again all of them white and thin, in “Matinee and Teatime Fashions.” Yet another showed four more women sporting “Chic by Seaside” style wearing “Stunning Beach Pajamas.” We found humor in the ads, but were also dismayed as we realized so many products targeted to women and girls today still portray them as ideally white and thin, and needing to be told how to dress appropriately by others.
I then told Marcy that I remembered watching her family’s department store ads on television. Her father owned a popular clothing store in New York City called Syms, though it served an aspirational clientele. Back in the 1980s, Marcy Syms would often appear in the Syms commercial. “An educated consumer is our best customer,” was the tagline, and Marcy explained to viewers how the company marked down the cost of its unsold items at regularly scheduled intervals to make them more affordable to their customers. In 1983 when the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange, Marcy became the president of the corporation, the youngest person to ever run a publicly traded company.
Marcy, now in her sixties, is the oldest of five brothers and sisters. “Being the oldest turned me into my siblings’ caregiver,” Marcy told me, “but it also taught me how to delegate fairly, which gave me great organizational training I use all the time in managing people in business and philanthropy.”
Marcy also learned something much more compelling, something that she viewed as illogical and unfair—that women were treated differently, unfairly, both at home and in the workplace.
She made it one of her early missions to change business practices at the company once she became the employer of hundreds and eventually thousands of workers. Speaking to the illogical part of her experience, she shared, “When the chores were divided up between my mother and my father, my mother did the household work, cleaning, ironing, and the like, and my father did the carpentry,” she told me. “This made no sense because my mother had much more natural inclinations for carpentry than my father. As a girl, I was given all the inside chores as well, whereas my brothers were able to do the outside work like packing up the garbage, raking the leaves, and plowing the snow.”
Marcy said she continually wondered why she wasn’t allowed to do any outside work. “It was completely illogical, irritating, and wasteful because I could have been helpful to my brothers.”
Despite these traditional gender roles instilled in her family’s home, Marcy’s father, Sy, learned early on to appreciate the advice of women. “He was the youngest of ten children, six of whom were girls, so he was preconditioned to listen to women’s advice, which they gave him often,” she said with a chuckle. She suspects this made him more receptive to her observations as well. “Although he was quite traditional in some ways, he didn’t box himself into believing only one way, which included not prejudging women and men.” He also taught Marcy to always question norms, and that if she sees something illogical to say something about it, and then change it in areas where she can influence change.
Marcy came to work with her father in 1978, almost twenty years after he opened his first clothing store. Marcy was in her late twenties and a college graduate with a master’s degree who had worked in the media business for a few years. The store was expanding into women’s apparel, and her father asked her to be the voice of a radio commercial he was planning to run. Not only did Marcy do that, but she created an entire media plan for the radio commercial. “That’s when I knew I wanted to work for the company full time,” she says. As she took on greater responsibilities, she also corrected things in the company’s culture, including making sure that female and male employees did the same jobs. At first, her father was against it, even though he supported Marcy’s abilities in other areas. “He was just convinced that men didn’t want to be fitted for a suit by a woman,” Marcy recalls. “I told him, ‘Are you kidding? Most men would love to have a woman measure their crotch.’” Marcy went on to institute a “one-store concept,” where there were no jobs that were exclusively female or male. “And there was no such thing as ‘demeaning’ work. Everyone had sweeping detail,” Marcy continues. As a result, the company’s work culture changed. Employees experienced new things, developed new skills, and found out what they were best suited for. “By continuing to rotate the jobs they would do, they also didn’t get stale while doing any single one of them,” she added.
By the early 1980s, the business had grown to eleven stores in four states, and after twenty-five years, to fifty-two stores in sixteen states. “On the day of our public offering, I stood right next to my dad to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange,” Marcy recalls. “It was a very gratifying moment.”
Once growing beyond its New York City roots, Syms was in a position to become a role model in its giving as an early supporter of community involvement, and by establishing a business school at Yeshiva University in New York. “Dad was particularly proud of this,” Marcy says. Over three decades, the family’s foundation has been hugely supportive of Public Television and Radio, PBS and NPR. It has also helped to originate programs like Frontline and Washington Week.
As an officer of the Sy Syms Foundation, Marcy also started to engage in her own philanthropic interests. “I always knew that gender inequality wasn’t addressed in important areas of American society,” she says. Just like when she was a child, Marcy felt this made no sense, so she made gender equality—and specifically getting the Equal Rights Amendment ratified—her greatest crusade.
“I had known Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney since her first run for Congress, and when she placed the Equal Rights Amendment imperative in front of me, I took up the fight full throttle,” Marcy recalled. “She had set in motion the reintroduction of the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in Congress in 1923 by suffragette Alice Paul and introduced every year since then. Decades later, the ERA was finally passed by Congress in 1972 and then went to the states, where the legislatures would vote on ratification. But by 1982, the deadline established according to the Constitution, we were still three states short of the requisite two-thirds needed.”
Marcy undertook a more formal role with the formation of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality, serving first as a board member and then as board chair. Today, through the efforts of Marcy and these two organizations, one more state needs to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and it looks like it will be Virginia in 2020. Congressional leaders in the House of Representatives have already marked up legislation to extend the 1982 deadline, and it is ready to be voted on.
“Gender justice is overdue,” Marcy told me. “Not having an ERA is unfair. It’s also insulting, and it enrages me, but I’m comfortable with the rage because it’s appropriate, and the energy I derive from it is being put forth in a constructive way that will ultimately move things forward in the right direction,” she adds, while still exuding a positive and assuring energy, just like she did the first time I met her. “We must have a society that includes equality of opportunity to fulfill our potential as a democracy.”